Children's Literature Association Quarterly

PROGRESSIVE UTOPIA: OR, HOW TO GROW UP WITHOUT GROWING UP A solitary young girl is traveling -- in an old stage coach on a dusty road, or an open buggy on a pretty street, or another buggy on a road "fringed with blooming wild cherry-trees and slim white birches." Maybe she is in a railway carriage, or just on a footpath where "the air is fragrant with the scent of mountain flowers."1 The girl may be five or nine, but is most likely eleven. She probably has remarkable eyes -- "big blue eyes" (PolIyanna) , "big eyes . . . full of spirit and vivacity" (Anne) , "eyes like faith" that "glowed like two stars" (Rebecca). Her other physical characteristics are less imposing. She is "a small dark-haired person in a glossy buff calico dress" (Rebecca) or "a slender little girl in . . . red-checked gingham" (Pollyanna) or in "a very short, very tight, very ugly dress of yellowish gray winsey" (Anne) . Perhaps she is just "a plain little piece of goods" in a black dress (Mary), or perhaps she is "wearing two frocks, one on top of the other" (Heidi). Whatever she is wearing, the people she is traveling towards will probably not approve of it. Those people will be old, or they will act as if they were old. They will be stiff and unfriendly, very strict about themselves and others. They will have suffered greatly in the past, probably because of thwarted love, and they will be unmarried or widowed. They will probably have a strong sense of duty. And the child who is about to descend on them will transform their lives and make them happy. This is the warmhearted world of the traditional novel for girls. While such novels are no longer written, many of the ones produced decades ago are still widely read. The continuing popularity of these novels is surprising, given the great differences between ourselves and our grandparents ; but even more surprising is their likeness to each other. Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Mary of The Secret Garden -- they live in widely separate countries, but their similarities outnumber their differences. They all live the same story, and they come to seem like variations of an ideal of female childhood that transcends national boundaries and even the boundaries of time -- for we still find the story enticing. This is the story. The young girl, an orphan, arrives at her new home, which belongs to a relative, an aunt or a grandfather, who has probably been living alone for a long time. Her sensible or faded clothing does not suit her character; she is a spontaneous and ebullient child, quite unaffected by her previous history of misfortune and deprivation . (Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden is an exception -- her spontaneity and IEullience don't emerge until later in the novel.) Luckily, our heroine's new home is a place of some physical comfort -- a refuge from the deprivation she has suffered so far. There is enough food, and she will have a room of her own for the first time. The room is sparsely furnished, but it has a window. Through the window, she will see beautiful prospects of trees or flowers or mountains and probably think of them as "delicious" (Rebecca, Pollyanna) . But, as it turns out, the physical comfort of the new house is not matched by its emotional atmosphere. Its current inhabitants, who are old and solitary and unhappy, make it a bleak and sterile place. It is quite cut off from the beauty to be seen from its windows. There is little evidence of love, and there are many hard rules for a young child to learn. Nevertheless, our heroine usually loves her new home. So she tries to love the people who live there and to live by their rules. Sometimes she does love them because she is too innocent to see how unloveable they are. Sometimes she finds them hard to love but manages it anyway. In fact, her almost magical qualities seem to triumph over every bad circumstance. She does not change much in the course of the events that follow -- she manages somehow to age without...